BDRShield Reviews

Currently, we use Vembu for weekly backups of our virtual infrastructure and monthly backups for separate, confidential data.

We use it only with VMware.

If our country is hit by a meteor, I have secured data in another country on the other side of the world. Then, I can start the restore process immediately with this solution.

There is an option to back up a specific folder from a specific source, not the whole virtual machine. 

The encryption is a must in these days. You can't do anything without encryption of your traffic or data.

The compression is unusable in every scenario because the data that we backup is too different, according to each type. Therefore, the compression is not applicable everywhere. So, we don't use the compression at all.

They can work on their cloud solution. In these days, the data becomes too much and you have to back up a lot of data to the site. They could offer cheaper storage to their clients with the cloud, making this a single source of truth solution. In our project, we are using two service providers: One who offers our storage and another who offers the software. If they work on their cloud solution and can offer their clients lower prices for this type of storage, this would be a really good improvement.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any issues with the software, like crashing or freezing.

I don't have any of the reservations about the scalability because we currently use it on a single machine. 

We have about three users who are part of the IT department, including two senior administrators and me, as IT manager.

Our account manager has provided us with great information and support. He is always on time. I haven't needed to wait more than two hours to read the answers to my questions.

Three years ago, we started the project to duplicate our infrastructure in every single aspect and needed to create daily backups of our virtual machines.

We picked Vembu two years ago, but switched to another solution which comes with integrated backup for virtual machines. This year, we start another project, which is to create offsite backups somewhere in the world. There were some requirements: the backup storage to be encrypted, the transfer to be encrypted, and not be so expensive. So, I looked at Vembu and Vinchin again. We were only satisfied with this tool (Vembu) when we started talking about money, because it was cheaper and could easily encrypt our non-dedicated storage.

The initial setup was as easy as one, two, three. I downloaded the software, then ran the application. They have a perfect documentation section on their website where you can find what you need: this tutorial.

Our deployment was about an hour.

We always start any project with a deployment strategy. This includes some type of testing. We go in with the result that we want and compare the software with our requirements. If it fits, then we start to reach the end result.

Currently, our whole offsite backup project, including Vembu, is about $500 per year to back up everything that we have. It is a lot of data, about 50 terabytes.

I find the licensing model to be valuable. The payment model is done with a set price or per virtual machine, and it is also done annually or on a permanent basis. You can choose whichever licensing model you prefer.

For our company, the current price of Vembu against Veeam is a few times cheaper. In our infrastructure, if we picked Veeam, we would have to pay about $20,000 per year. Now, we are currently paying about $2,000 per year for Vembu. You can do the math. The price is great.

Money always matters, so it could be cheaper, but this is not realistic for the market.

When we started to look for this type of software, we had to choose between Veeam, Vembu, or Vinchin. Vinchin is a new player on the market. 

We integrated a service provide into our own solution. This is why I picked Vembu at first, because it can be integrated with a third-party service provider and was the only software able to be integrated into our solution. Vembu offers a cloud offsite service, which is a type of Vembu storage where you can store your backups if you don't have other options.

Vinchin is easier to use with simpler interfaces. However, when you read the features, because it is new software in the market, there were not some functions built-in, like encryption. Vembu encrypts the traffic when it transfers it to its destination. According to our Vinchin and Vembu comparison, Vembu is pretty complicated against Vinchin, but Vembu is easier to install and update.

Reasons why we went with Vembu:

1. The price. 
2. The integration option. 
3. They offered a lot of additional features that we don't use currently, but you never know what you will need in the future.

The software is currently satisfying our needs for us. We aren't using all of Vembu features at the moment.

We use data reservation in our offsite data backup.

It is compatible with almost everything that exists on the market. It's compatible with VMware and Hyper-V. With VMware, it works very well. We haven't had any issues so far. 

I would advise to try it and not to look at the prices of the top players on the market, though do look at alternative software. Sometimes, you need to try more than one or two solutions, then switch to whichever one is better. Pretty often, we speak to some not-so famous product or company to complete our approach.

I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

Our daily scheduled backups are only with Vembu. We are using the disk based solution only.

We are a business school.

We have restored with the full backup. It was completely fine using Quick VM Recovery. The time frame depends on the size of the server, e.g., if it is 100 GB, then it will take an hour. Restoring would not be possible without Vembu.

Because all our servers are hosted on VMware, the VMware backup is the most valuable feature. The integration and backup with VMware are very good. 

The compression is fine because it is compressing the full backup files. For example, if our full backup is 100 GB, then it can be reduced down between 40 GB to 80 GB.

There are some limitation in Vembu that can be improved. When you take the backup from any server, the full incremental backup is limited. For example, if you run a weekly full backup and monthly backup, they cannot be run at the same time. I should not have to create a new job, but in this scenario, I am creating two jobs. The limitation is created because if I select monthly backup, then I cannot select weekly backup.

We have only been working with Vembu for a few months.

The performance is good. There are no issues with performance.

Backups are run at night, then we check them in the morning. We don't do active maintenance.

If we have multiple jobs running at the same time, then the performance will be reduced, e.g., if you run four or five jobs at once. If only one job is running, then the solution can be very fast.  

It is deployed across our entire network, but we have a very small environment.

Their technical support is good and helpful. Their response time is as we expect it to be. If I raise a case, they will come back to me within half an hour to an hour at maximum.

Previously, we used Veeam Backup, but we replaced it with Vembu. We switched because Vembu is more cost-effective. So, price was a factor.

The initial setup is straightforward and doesn't take much time.

It takes two people to deploy it, e.g., a backup admin and I deployed it.

This solution has help us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduced budgets.

With our manual backups, we can combine two or three jobs into one, taking three hours. We are reducing our time spent on backups by approximately two-thirds.

One month ago, we subscribed for one year.

At another organization, I have worked with Dell EMC NetWorker and Commvault (about two or three years ago). Dell EMC NetWorker can do the weekly and monthly backups that Vembu cannot.

We are not using the deduplication feature. I am not 100 percent sure how the deduplication works on Vembu.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of 10. The product is good, but they need to resolve the multiple policies issue that is currently restricting us on the server.

We are using the Enterprise version for backup. With the license that we have now, I'm using the NetworkBackup application. This includes having email backup with MS Exchange Server, which is very helpful because we can restore by mailbox or mail. We don't have to restore the entire server.

We also have FAS, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and MySQL databases. It is very easy to use with them.

I have some virtual machines. I use an VMware ESXi server to back them up.

I have a strategy in the company where everyone needs to bring all their important files on the server. People should not be keeping their folders on their computer because of two types of situations:

1. In the last two months, there were situations where the local hard drive failed, people were very happy to have their files on the server. 
2. There have been three times where people modified the file, then asked me if it's possible to get back the file that they had before, so I used the backup. 

I just started backing up to virtual machines. They are very good if something happens. I can restore to another site. There are a lot of options to restore with virtual machines, such as, mounting on another server to open mount locally and extracting some files. I was very surprised because it seems like we have a lot of options. 

I was very happy seeing that the incremental backup was very nice because the modified files are taken from the number of times it was modified. Thus, if I have a file I modified two years ago, I don't back it up each time.

It backs up from the latest version. I can write there that I need the last three modified images of the file. One image could be from a year ago, another one or two days ago, and the third from three years ago. It does not delete by date.

It is easy to use. There is an offsite DR solution where I can keep an offsite copy of the backups. 

The transfer is encrypted. I checked the storage pool's compression and not a lot of space was used. I was expecting more, which is why I think the compression is good.

I saw that it's not possible to have the last full backup duplicated on our site. Therefore, if I have a lot of information on the main site, I would not want to copy any information to those site servers. It would be nice to be able to make a copy of the last full backup. 

I have sent a lot of missed scheduled emails, but maybe I'm doing something wrong. I will try contacting support to see what I can do better. 

I started two months ago. 

Nothing has happened other than expected until now. We have had no errors.

A system administrator and I are doing deployment and maintenance. He checks the tasks every day.

It's 100 percent scalable because we can add as many servers as we want. 

Their support is great. I think they work 24 hours a day. I get a very quick turnaround time from them no matter the day or time that I send them an email.

A long time ago, I used Symantec Backup. I cannot compare the two solutions.

I was trying to find a backup solution two months ago. I googled for the best backup solution vendors in 2020. I saw Vembu. It was listed as very easy to use and cheap for what it's doing, as a platform. I started a trial (pilot). When I checked the license prices, it was free which was in my budget. I was really happy to find that someone from a management location could do backups using the service.

The price for Vembu was very important and key to our decision-making. Also, Vembu support was very important. When I didn't know how to do anything, I wrote to support and the response time was quick. Basically, it was cheap, easy to install, the agentless backup was very nice, and support was very responsive

The initial setup was very easy. It integrated easily with Windows, Linux, and NetApp backup.

The deployment took about one hour (max) per server.

This solution helps us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduces budgets. 

With the free version of Vembu, you receive three virtual machine backups. However, if you buy the NetworkBackup Enterprise version, you don't have access to the features seen in the free version. This is a situation that Vembu should solve. This caused a misunderstanding between sales and us. I was hoping if I buy the licenses, then after the trial I would not have to purchase virtual machine licenses. Maybe they should offer these three virtual machine backups as part of the Enterprise license.

I tried to install two other solutions. However, I found Vembu very nice because in its trial period, it includes all the features. During the trial period, I was able to check exactly what happens if I use another type of solution from Vembu, and it was easy to test.

I chose this backup solution because it fits what I need.

Try it and see what it can deliver. It is very easy to test and check the licenses. 

The only situation that was not what I expected: I need to have a full copy of the backup, plus a live session of the back up which involves a lot of copies. I need a lot of hard drive capacity offshore and offsite.

I don't know how to check the deduplication.

Our primary use case is for VM backups.

We were using an older version and just upgraded two weeks ago.

The virtual machine backup is important for stability and scalability since our servers are on virtual machines. 

Another good thing is that it has cloud backup.

There are bugs. For one month, I encountered a big issue where my storage pool could not be identified. My backups were stopped because they were not able to locate the storage pool. So, I removed the settings and started the backups again. The application is not stable. It needs some debugging and testing on the build side of production.

We use Vembu with Microsoft Hyper-V. While the installation is not a problem, there is a problem with the operation side of things. It should be automated. There is something wrong with the structure affecting the product because the backup should not be disturbed. We found without any changes to the network structure then the backups would be affected and I could not fix it by myself. I did not contact support for this, as it was probably due to the new update, but I am unsure. Now, I am monitoring this issue.

Six months.

Its application stability needs improvement. I have seen issues recently with it. Backups must have a very stable application. If your backup system is crashing, that means you cannot trust it.

The scalability is good. It can scale. Adding a new server to a foreign location is easy.

We have nine locations. We do have plans to increase usage of the solution. 

The IT department has five people who are administrators. One person configures the backups and others monitor the backups.

The technical support is good.

This BDR is the first proper solution that we are using. We previously used manual backups.

Initially, we had some problems when we tried to do the setup ourselves, but then the support helped us. They had a direct session with me and helped me with the installation. After that, it was fine.

The deployment is easy and fast. A location can be deployed in a day.

For each version, we have a dedicated BDR server and local storage. I schedule the backups. From there, we upload to the cloud storage. Therefore, each location will have their own BDR that will back up to the cloud.

The initial deployment to the cloud is important because once the backups are into operations making changes is not that flexible.

This solution helped us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduced our budget by 50 percent. We spent $3,000 on Vembu's licenses where other solutions were almost double.

The competitor for Vembu is Veeam, who is very popular and famous. Vembu is good, but still has a long way to go. We found Vembu BDR to be more affordable.

Veeam is good for very high-end servers.

Right now, we are satisfied with Vembu's operational performance and requirements. It is just a simple backup solution where we can backup all of our VMs.

Vembu allows you to implement a variety of different requirements.

I would rate the product as a six (out of 10). It needs some more work to be done in regards to product stability and functionality.

We use it to back up ESXi clients, so mainly Linux based or Unix based servers on our ESXi host.

We use the solution to back up our virtual environments (VMware). It has been good for our organization so far.

It makes it possible for us to back up our Unix machines without installing a host, client, or any client software. It gives us some peace of mind in regards to those servers getting backed up.

The number one feature is that we can back up our servers without having to install a client. It is the only reason why I have this product.

The user interface isn't that good. I don't think that the product is user-friendly. Comparing it side by side to Acronis, I would say to Vembu, "Hey, you could make your user interface a little easier."

Vembu will tell you the next scheduled backup, but it doesn't show you the last successful backup. I would have them include a column under "List of Backup Jobs" and have two other columns which say, "Last Successful Backup" and "Next Scheduled Backup", because you don't know now if it's backed up successfully. It just says, "The next scheduled time is this." You don't know from looking at that pane of glass when the last time it actually happened without digging further into reports.

Two years or more.

It is stable. I haven't had it crash or break on me.

I don't think we've actually had a reason to restore a machine as it's never failed. We've never had a server fail. The only thing that it has done for us is give us peace of mind that our server is backed up.

Everybody is impacted if one of these servers failed. The only way we could get it back up and running was to restore it from a Vembu Backup. It would impact everybody if the servers went down, so approximately 3,000 users would be impacted if the backup wasn't successfully happening and we needed to use it.

We haven't had reason to scale it up to back up anything else. We aren't really using the product to its fullest capabilities. I think it has a lot more that it can do.

I am the only user using it, as we only use it for backing up our servers.

I do have plans to increase usage.

Every time I have called, I've had good tech support.

I didn't use a previous solution. I selected this solution because it was the only one I could find for the cost that did what I needed it to do.

It was pretty easy to set up. The initial setup was probably only 15 minutes.

Our implementation strategy was to make it so we could back up our VMware clients. That was the whole purpose of the software. We don't use it for our Windows Servers. For that, we use a different product. However, we couldn't use the other product on the Linux and Unix space machines because the other software requires that a client be installed.

We bought it directly from Vembu and installed it ourselves.

This solution helps us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduces budgets. We are saving $6,000 every three years versus having another product.

Backups are an insurance thing. This is a life insurance policy to make it so if our servers failed, we would have something to get them back. Since we haven't had a server fail, it is just like life insurance. While it has cost us money, it has given us peace of mind that if we needed it, then it would be there.

The pricing is very good.

Our license is about to expire on it.

We did evaluate some other products before choosing this one. 

We also use Acronis Backup Advanced. The way that Vembu backs up to a backup drive, it uses a pool of drives to back up. Whereas, Acronis backs up to just a single file. You can see that individual file on its own. You can browse to it and see that the file that has been saved. It also says the last successful backup it did. 

Vembu's user interface isn't as easy to use compared to Acronis Backup Advanced, which has a better interface for me to be able to see what's happening.

I haven't found a competitor who does as good a job for the money.

This is a good product to choose if you are in the same situation as we are in.

It does do compression and that works fine.

We don't use Hyper-V.

I would give it a five out of 10, because I think that it could use some polishing on the interface for the client.

We use it to backup VMware virtual machines, so I'm backing up my VMware environment. My product is for Windows Server Backup.

We are a small business. We don't use the enterprise version of the solution.

It has improved our business continuity.

We have used this solution to recover from a few incidences. 

The firewall backup is the most valuable feature. We need it sometimes when we recover a single file.

The compression is the most useful feature for me.

The product's stability needs some improvements. 

The support is a bit slow in resolving an issue. It takes a long time to recover.

One year.

The solution is 90 percent stable. It is running well. The availability is good.

Two or three employees are needed for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

I only have two servers. I don't test other servers.

We don't count our users for this solution as it is a backup service.

I would rate the technical support as eight or nine (out of 10). I would like them to improve their response rate.

This was our first product.

The initial setup was neither simple nor complex; it was intermediate. It took four hours to set up/deploy. We implemented it into a very simple environment (Windows Server Backup).

We deployed it ourselves.

We have seen ROI with Vembu. The solution is worth it based on the few times that we used it for recovery.

We tested three products. One of the other products that we evaluated was Altaro.

We chose Vembu because the compatibility was better.

I would definitely recommend Vembu. We have been mostly satisfied with the solution. We plan to keep using it.

Overall, I would rate the product as a nine (out of 10).

I've actively been using the Vembu product for backups. It is being used to back up the Hyper-V environment that I have. If the hypervisor has hardware problems, e.g., all the storage dies, you can run up a new Hyper-V server, then restore the VMs onto it. It doesn't take that long. So, you are up and running within several hours of restoring it. Also, you can restore individual files. Therefore, it's a full VM-based image backup as well as a file level backup, if you want to restore the files that way. There is also an option to restore AD users, computers, and contacts, in addition to Exchange databases at the brick level.

I'm mainly working with home-based customers. I don't have any business clients yet.

It's on-premise, not cloud-based at the moment. I'm planning to possibly have replication to an external site since my Internet link is much better now. That will be done in the future. I'll probably replicate to a private cloud somewhere.

The main thing is recovery. I have had a lot of hardware failures quite recently due to power fluctuations and overheating. Therefore, I am using it on a lab environment where I test things for customers. It has helped to reduce time. For example, one of the hypervisors died, so I loaded up another non-clustered machine and just restored the previous night's backup, then the VMs worked fine. 

I am able to run Vembu on Windows NAS, which is beneficial. It does install on a Windows-based NAS. You can have the server running from the location where you are storing backups. You don't need a separate server for it in this case. This is only available with the licensed version.

The image backup on VM is the most valuable feature.

You can restore to another location or another physical/virtual machine. You can do P2V as well as V2V. That is what I have found most useful.

The encryption feature seems okay. When you change versions, then I have found it to have problems. An example: I was on version 3.9, and I had an encrypted VM. It was restored from version 4 onto a newer Hyper-V server. So, I went from maybe a 2008 to 2012, and it was restored and then it didn't restore, and because of those changes, it didn't like the encryption. But, generally if the version and the hypervisor version are the same, then you shouldn't have any problems with it.

There was one issue though with the hardware IDs. When I went to a different version of Hyper-V, the hardware IDs weren't restored and the machine got two new IDs. The preliminary unique IDs weren't restored, so I had to reactivate programs. That was the only downside.

I have been using it close to two years.

The stability has been okay. If you put too much load on it, then it does become a bit unstable. The server that you are using does matter. Whenever I've tried to contact the tech support, they say upgrade to the latest version. The problem with that is the old backups need to be all done again because it appears that on each version upgrade the old backups no longer continue. They need to be done as a full backup again. 

I haven't had too many issues with failed backups. There were some backups failing, but I found that was just before the drive failures. So, there were multiple drive failures which caused the problems, but the product itself has been okay. 

At times, when I have done a restore or mount multiple images at the same time, it has become a bit unstable. However, I just needed to restart the Vembu service, then it started working again. 

It's fairly straightforward to restore and do backups. It keeps on running. There is not much in terms of maintenance required. It has recovery points that you can retain, so it's pretty much a send and forget solution. You can have it running indefinitely.

It appears to be scalable. If you have a cluster, it will back that up. Also, if you run out of storage space, then you can add more storage to it. So, you can add an additional storage pool from a USB, then allocate that to be used. For example, if you run out of space on one NAS, but that NAS has access to another volume, you can add that as another storage pool so you can have multiple storage pools. 

The technical support's response time was okay. I had to wait several hours for a response, but that was probably because of the time difference. All in all, it was quite acceptable and sort of normal.

I've been using Veeam for quite some time with other customers. I don't know of other customers who use Vembu, but it's very similar to Veeam. I'm finding it quite similar to Veeam, which is good. Because if anyone wants to move to Vembu, and they've used Veeam, they will pick it up quickly.

I came across Vembu when I was searching for alternatives for Veeam with any type of image backup for Microsoft Hyper-V. I came across Vembu who had at the time was giving backups for up to three VMs on the free version. I was sort of growing with my VMs. I had three, but I soon crossed that amount. That's how I came across Vembu: I found there were cost limitations and was looking for an alternative to Veeam that did the same sort of thing.

It was fairly straightforward to install and get running. However, installing the agent on the hypervisor was a bit tricky, because the version that I was using is just a core version. So, it's has no GUI. In that version, there were some special instructions, which we did have thankfully, and there were a few extra steps that I needed to take to install the agent. What normally happens is the agent can be pushed out from the BDR Server, but that wasn't working on the core version. The initial setup was not relatively easy, but not relatively hard, it was just in-between.

The deployment took an hour and a half. 

The implementation strategy was to try and get the BDR Server running to sort of simplify things. Then, we could have another server just as a backup server. 

I deployed it myself. I did use some documentation that they had. So, it was more or less trial and error. I was running a Windows OS on the NAS, and they didn't exactly say that they supported it. They just said, "If it works, it works. If it doesn't work, then you'll have to get the full OS because mobile NASs come with a Windows Storage Server." They didn't really certify to run on that. However, in the end, it did work quite well.

When one of the VMs dropped off, I was able to recover fairly quickly. Therefore, I have noticed a return on investment. It has helped to reduce at least a day's worth of downtime. Which, if I didn't have the image backup, I would be loading all those VMs again. Some of them did take time to build. So, a case per a day if not more, because the other option was just to rebuild the whole environment from scratch if I didn't have those image backups. So, about every six months, I am saving several hundred dollars of downtime.

I was using their free version, which had limitations, so then I went to the licensed version.

It has actually benefited my operation a fair bit. VMware requires a special hardware while Hyper-V runs on pretty much anything. It doesn't require any special hardware, so it saves a bit of money. Because Vembu does Hyper-V backup, there is no limit on how many VMs you can have. The newer version has a 100 VM limit on the single license, which has been greatly beneficial, because on one host a 100 VMs is a fair bit. 

The licensing model is quite complicated; it's not simple. An example: If you have a physical server, you have to pay more for that license than you do for a host. It could be running several VMs and that could be a server VM as well. Then, for web station machines, there is no license for those machines and they have no desktop OS - the free version has all this functionality. Their license model needs to be looked at and simplified.

At the moment, I am doing Vembu for one host. My costs are about $25 USD a month for a single host up to 100 VMs. It's just the license per host with one CPU, but if I did choose offsite cloud replication, they do charge for the data. They charge per gigabyte, or something like that. They have plans. 

When they changed to the newest version (4.1), they have more VMs allowed on the free version. Before, there were only three VMs allowed on the free version, and if you needed to back up more than three VMs, you had to get the paid version. Now, you can have up to 10 VMs on the free version. This was when I was just crossing over to 10 VMs or was very close to it. If I had known, then I would've not paid for the monthly licensing cost. I've since crossed 10 VMs, so this doesn't matter to me, but it will matter to someone who only wants to back up a few VMs. E.g., if they had five VMs and were forced onto the licensed version, then in the update, the free version could back up 10 VMs.

I know that the normal Windows Backup won't backup the VMs if you're using it in a HA Failover Clustering environment. If you're using it in a clustered high availability environment, it will back up the VMs. That is the main difference I found. But, in terms of backing it up, Vembu does support the HA Failover Clustering, so it can back up when you have VMs on a Cluster Shared Volume. It can back up those VMs unlike the built-in Windows Backup, which doesn't support that.

I evaluated Altaro but there were some requirements that you needed for install on the Windows-based NAS. That was my main issue at the time. Because of the way I planned to have the backup solution running on the Windows-based NAS, a few of the solutions wouldn't install or had problems.

A lot of the other people that I know use Veeam, StorageCraft ShadowProtect, and Kronos. Not too many people that I know use Vembu, but I found it to be the equivalent of Veeam in some ways. It does work very similarly in its functions.

The pros for Vembu vs Veeam are Vembu's license cost for a host seems to be much cheaper and Veeam might not run on certain hardware. The Veeam Backup & Replication Server has some hardware requirements that I could not get to install on the net, but Vembu installed quite happily.

The cons for Vembu vs Veeam are Vembu's licensed model is a bit complicated, and if things go wrong in Vembu, there is less support out there. You do have to contact Vembu's support to have a look at a problem, whereas with Veeam, there is quite a bit of knowledge out there in terms of online forums. 

I have learned just how important backups are. 

My advice would be try and implement it on virtual environments. Don't implement it on a physical environment because the licensing costs would be much higher. You will have less options for recovering VMs. It would be wise to have a cluster. Also, the BDR server should be well spec'd. You can run on the minimum spec, but it is recommended that it has some definite amounts of RAM on it. 

I am planning to use Vembu to work in VMware, but I have not done that yet. After I pick up some customers, I might try to push it out to them in their VMware environment. At the moment, it's just Microsoft Hyper-V.

I don't really use the deduplication feature.

I would probably rate the solution around seven and a half out of 10. It missed out on a few scores because each time when you upgrade the version, you have to do all the backups again. That's why I didn't give it a 10. If it didn't need to do all the backups again when changing the version, then I would have given it a 10 easily.

In the near future, if Vembu stays the way it is now with its licensing costs and everything else, then I will continue to use it and expand on it. I will try and push it out to some of my customers as well. A lot of customers just use Veeam or Kronos at the moment and may switch for the cost savings.

We use it for providing backups and recovery. We have a file server with a little over seven terabytes of data. The content changes quite a bit and we needed an easy tool to work with that would give us the ability to restore in a variety of ways: at the individual file level, folder level, and whole volume level, if necessary. This tool does that for us.

We're in telecom and wireless. We do installations and maintenance of towers and equipment for microwave and cellular. We do that mostly in the United States, occasionally in other places in the world. We'll have 400 people out in the field providing data to us that we have to put in a repository, that's the file server, that shows work prior to us initiating our work assignment from our customer, during the process, and at completion. That way, the customer doesn't have to go to remote places to verify. Sometimes, we can address an intermittent problem and say it's fixed and, of course, it comes back the next day because it really wasn't fixed. So, it's hard for our customer to know when something is done.

So we take a lot of images of our work, associated with projects, and those are uploaded by the field people every day. We provide the backup necessary to our customer. We'll receive ten or 20 gigabytes of images daily, which go into the repository. They have to be tracked and recorded, put into the reports associated with the projects and the status of those projects, and then provided to our customers.

That's what we do on a daily basis. We're a 24/7 shop, so what we do has to minimize downtime, so that the tools are available to the people, especially if they're in the field. They'll VPN in and provide reports and images necessary to show the work has been performed.

The nice thing about Vembu is that when it's running - as it does incrementals daily - we don't see a negative hit on the performance of the server it runs on. I can also pause it, should that happen, but I've never had to do that. 

It generates daily reports. I look at them seven days a week, even though I only work five days a week, because I want to make sure that everything's working fine. From a productivity standpoint, it has not hindered anyone and it keeps me very well informed that our backups are being completed. It gives me the data that I need to know, that makes me feel comfortable: Yes, that makes sense for that day, that much data being added to our repository, etc.

It has made my job, making sure we have a backup and being able to count on using it, a lot easier. As far as impacting the user community that uses the file server that's being addressed for backup purposes, it has not impacted them in any negative way whatsoever.

Finally, it helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets at a price that - and we don't want to encourage them to change their pricing - is a great value.

The dashboard is very easy to use, setting up the backup is very intuitive. Since that's our primary purpose in using it, it made it easy, when I was doing evaluations a year ago, to choose the product.

If I want to back up to this past Friday, and reinstall the file server to that state, I can choose a point in time and issue the command to back up and I don't need to go in and restore the last full backup and then apply iteratively, sequentially, all the incrementals, as I've had to do in some other software in the past. It's nice that I can pick a point in time and tell it I want to go to that state and it's transparent to me. It happens in the background for me.

It's very easy to use, very quick and efficient. From a backup standpoint, it has provided us the tools we need on a daily basis to know that it's working properly and with almost no manual maintenance work from us to verify it. It just comes to us. It's been very positive, helping us address that need efficiently.

In the beginning, when we had some hiccups, I would chalk that up more to a learning curve for the product. Once we understood how it operated - where we thought it was doing something a certain way and it was not - it was easy to understand, once it was pointed out.

The times when we've had problems, they've not been repeated problems, they've been addressed, and it was more learning curve issues. With any software there is a learning curve. Not all backup software operates exactly the same way, so some things were a little bit different. But once we understood why and how they worked, it made sense. It was sometimes a different approach, but not a problem for us.

There is no problem with the product's stability. We get our nightly reports on schedule. We've never had the application fail, and better, the application doesn't interfere with anyone else's application. It's been everything and more than what we had hoped for.

I can only speak for our environment where we've used it - and I know it has so much more capabilities, because when we go in through the dashboard and the wizard to create backups, we see where we could use it and how we could use it. But in our environment, whether we had seven-and-a-half terabytes or 15, I wouldn't have to change anything.

The other thing that I like is that it has software to provide a distributed copy to another site. It's a very economical add-on to the suite. But because it's terabytes, and with it going across the Internet to do the initial cloning of that, it has a feature where you bring in your other servers, set it up, establish your initial clone there, and you put the server out and then you only have to keep track of the changes, which is much easier to do. We have a 100-megabit connection to the internet, but even there, if you're going to have to keep terabytes worth of data synced, it would be really hard. In this case, we only have to keep track of the delta once the initial distributed backup has been made.

It has a lot of capabilities. We just started getting into the distributed backup and, from a scalability perspective, I've not seen any issues in our use of it. And especially in the beginning, we monitored the resource usage to make sure that we didn't see a degradation on the server to the user. That was not a problem.

I could easily see us doubling what we're backing up without any issues and problems and with no additional tuning necessary.

The other thing that stands out, while it isn't a feature per se, is support. Any time we have a question, whether we call or email them, we get an amazing response. We're not a Fortune 500 company, we're smaller, we don't have a large number of licenses yet. But we get quick response and follow-up to make sure that the issue has been properly addressed, as though we were a Fortune 500 company. I'm amazed by the level of support they provide.

Last time I contacted them was because the volume that we put our backups on became full, and I wasn't sure what the best way was to address the problem. They gave me directions on how to address the problem, but more importantly, on how to avoid the problem in the future.

Around October of 2018, I did escalate an issue regarding backups but that was the only time that I can remember having to do so. Like everything else, it went extremely well. The follow-up and the level of detail, hands-on, were great. I've been in IT for 40 years and it's not something I'm used to seeing. It has been a nice surprise.

The oldest previous solution we had was Windows Server Backup.

Once we put Vembu on the production server, we ran a full backup that evening. That's probably one of the nicest things about the backup. Not that companies don't have seven-plus terabytes of data to backup - that's large, but there are certainly many that have much more than that - but backing up that much data in Windows Backup is an impossible task. So the ability to address the data in the way that Vembu does, versus the way Windows Backup does, we had to use a Vembu-type product. There was no choice. Seven-and-a-half terabytes in Windows Backup, on a server level, would've taken weeks, which is not acceptable.

We needed a solution that was doable. Some of the solutions that we were using took an unreasonable amount of time to back up the data. Even when they were running on the same server and the pool was on the same server that they were backing up to, it was not acceptable. We needed something that was more efficient in the way it addressed reading the file structure. Vembu provided that. Then we had the additional functionalities that we wanted to be able to restore the way I mentioned, plus the support. I can't say enough about the support Vembu. I just don't have any other positive experiences that are as nice as what they provide.

Nothing was complex regarding the initial setup. We could do backups on day one with the software. It wasn't a question of just doing the backups but of trying to do them so it provided us the greatest amount of flexibility and that we were using our pool space as efficiently as we could. That took a little bit of investigating and communication with support. But once we understood it, it was not a problem.

On the initial install, there were some things that I thought were going to happen a little differently. We thought we wouldn't eat up the size of our pool, our repository, for backups as quickly because of compression. But when you think about it, that's not a Vembu issue. That's just a practical result of the fact that jpegs already come compressed, so you're not going to get much compression. We underestimated the amount of space we needed.

Installing it takes just a couple of hours. It's easy to do. There was no negative impact on anything else running on it. It was simple. We did a backup the same day we installed it, in a test environment, so we could do whatever we wanted. We could do restores, do incrementals, combine incrementals to weeklies, etc. And we didn't have any problem doing any of those things. We'd have a question, periodically, but we would get a response the same day, which was always nice.

In terms of staff for deployment, I'll divide that into two pieces. One was a more thorough test of our environment, versus not the high-level tests that we did during the evaluations. We did that over a two-week period of time with a quarter to a half of a person.

Regarding the implementation strategy we developed, there was an assessment of what our needs were, tailored to our specific situation. Once we did that, we evaluated what products we might be able to use. We then considered support and maintenance issues and would the products be able to function within our requirements, timeframes, and give us the backup capabilities at the levels that we wanted: file, folder, and volume. This process allowed us to come up with a shortlist of three products and do a little bit deeper testing with them and decide on which one we thought was the best. 

We haven't done an analysis of how much money we have saved by switching to Vembu. We did a post-implementation assessment that made sure all of our requirements were met. Part of that is financial, but I can divulge the savings that it provided.

I've worked for extremely large companies as well as startup companies. In our environment - out of this office we have 400 field people - we're a relatively small business. If I was backing up multiple file servers, much more data than we are, it wouldn't take much more time with Vembu. There's an inherent amount of time to install and get to know a product, and then to use it. If it's pretty intuitive with good support, it can be really easy. Vembu has turned out to be really easy. The amount of budget associated with supporting is way under what we expected. That's a good thing and that's because of the support that they provide, instead of us having to do things like we have to do with some of our other applications.

For example, we've used our accounting system for a long time here, and people are used to it; creatures of habit, like most. But the amount of support that it takes, despite it being here for decades, means that any time we make a change it's way more involved. There's an element of risk that we don't care for. It's not what we like. There's an unpredictability about it. We have not seen that with the Vembu product.

It's an amazing value. Their licensing structure is easy to understand and it's very fair. We don't have any problem with it.

We looked at different tools and tested them ourselves. We had our own requirements list of what we needed to do, and it was all tailored to our environment. The evaluation occurred over a month of elapsed time and probably involved a person to person-and-a-half in that period of time.

Quite honestly, we could have gone with other products, but the support level from Vembu was unparalleled. Today, a lot of companies want to refer you to a forum, a community, and they don't want to talk. They don't want to provide people who know the product and know your situation. It's hard to find an example in a forum that is exactly like what you're trying to address. Vembu, consistently over the month, as well as the second-level evaluation, was always there to provide support and answer questions. It was a deciding factor, absolutely. They had the functionality, but they provided the real people for support, which just made a world of difference for us.

Some of the companies that we were using and evaluating, when we told them what we ended up choosing, just out of courtesy, in some cases they either didn't know who they were or acted like they didn't know who they were. 

It was an easy decision, when it came to the end, to choose Vembu.

It has to meet your needs. But for most people, for backups of large amounts of data, I would strongly encourage you to use it, and not be hesitant to contact the support desk if you have a question. Don't just install it with the intent that your first use is going to be your final setup because there are ways to tune it to make it more efficient on space usage for the pool where you put your backups. The help is there. That's the good thing. With most other products, you're not going to get the same response. Use the help and you're probably going to be quite happy with it.

I would encourage you to count on support, run your tests, play with it, and you'll be pleasantly surprised and happy with the results.

Of the software that I license, I feel I get more value from this than any others. I just can't think of anything that I'm looking for that Vembu BDR isn't already addressing. I've got no wish list for them.

Everything I need is being addressed by the product and then some. I wish them great success and I want them to be around a long time. I don't want to have to go and replace this. This is a good product. It does what we need and I'm not seeing anything that I wish it had.

I like the compression, encryption, and deduplication features, although in our case, we don't get much compression because a lot of our material is already compressed. There just isn't an opportunity to see a big reduction. But the tools allow us to have every feature we want, including being able to restore from the backups. Of course, we don't have to do full backups very often, because of the way it has been set up.

Encryption today is, obviously, given privacy issues and confidentiality, very important. In our particular case, it's an added plus but it wasn't a real high criterion because the data that we have is not considered highly confidential. In fact, if it was put out in the public domain, it would not cause our customer or ourselves a problem. It's nice to have, but it wasn't something that was as critical to us as it might be to a lot of others.

We don't use it to back up our virtual environments. We keep things very discreet here. We don't run a VM type of environment. Servers are by function. Hardware has become so incredibly cheap. I understand the savings, the value with VM and having a virtual environment for different things. But to us, hardware is just incredibly inexpensive. If we have something in our accounting system that needs to be addressed, an upgrade or the like, we like having it on its own server and discreet from everything else. It also inherently provides easier access control for those systems that are more critical, in terms of the type of information on them.

Regarding staff for maintenance of the solution, we're talking fractions. We just look at our reports daily just to make sure that they are giving us the information we need, indicating that backups were successful and that the expected amount of data that was backed up. We know how much data comes in every day approximately. We can confirm that it's been done properly. It's just minutes a day. I don't think it needs a full day per month of attention. The maintenance is extremely low.

We have other environments that we need to address in a different way than we are today. The company is old enough that, like most entities, it is a creature of habit. So changing the way we do things is a little slow sometimes. But I can see us using this in several other environments, other than what we initially targeted. I can't tell you when that will happen but I believe that it will happen because of the experience we've had.

The end-users don't use it, per se, because they have no touch with it. It's IT that uses it. Nobody has a problem with it. We have a small group of six IT people in this main building. We try to get different people exposed to it. They vary from application support, mostly in the accounting area, and then, because we do a lot of VPN, we have network people who handle network security. We have failover network with multiple ISPs so networking becomes a big issue, plus the security side. Percentage-wise, there are more people involved in network and security than in many companies. Yet those people are still required to be able to support the applications we have, including Vembu. Nobody's had a problem doing that.

I'd love to try it in a virtual environment. We just don't do that here. We're a Windows Server shop, so I've not tried it in other operating systems, like Unix and Linux.

For my needs, I'd give Vembu a nine out of ten, and that's only because I'm hesitant to say anything is perfect.

Everything could be improved. For example, if you were to have a custom backup solution created, it might be a ten if they achieved everything you listed regarding what you need. But it's not practical to do that for an individual or a small company. I've been responsible for a lot of development people and developing applications. It's somewhat subjective on where you place buttons and how efficient they are.

Once you get used to a product, if it wasn't made for you, and it's working and meeting all your needs, without having negative side effects, you got to give it a high score. It's the only fair thing to do. The only way for me to get to a ten is to say that it's perfect, that it laid out all its buttons and features just as I would. If I had written it, maybe that would be the case, but by the time I had written it and gotten it done, I'd be retired. 

It's a great product. Amazing support. It's a very good value for our environment, no question. We will not change. This is a good product that does everything we want and more.